Descriptive Examination System [DES]
What is Descriptive Examination System (DES)?
Welcome to Descriptive Examination System (DES), an online tool that tackles your test requirements with friendly interfaces. It is mainly focused on managing university/school type exams containing descriptive questions or a mix of descriptive and objective type questions. Various exam related tasks such as paper pattern creation and reuse, question paper creation, conducting the exam, evaluation of the answer sheets are made easy and online using the tool. The framework offers a number of benefits such as reuse of resources, reduction in time, effort paper work and human errors during evaluation, with the assessment of answers still being done manually.
What can you do easily?
1. Create and reuse paper patterns
2. Maintain a question bank organized in various subjects & topics
3. Create question papers using existing paper patterns and question bank
4. Create exams based on question papers & assign students, examiners to the exam
5. Conduct descriptive type exams online
6. Examine answer sheets online (manually)
7. Publish & view results online
Salient features of DES
1. Web-based & open source
2. Provides support for complex paper pattern
- consisting of nested sections, optional sections, optional questions sections, etc.
3. Facilitates independent management & reuse of paper pattern, question bank and question paper
4. Intuitive drag and drop interface for question paper creation
5. Flexible evaluation strategies
- “Question-wise”
- “Student-wise”
6. Useful statistics & indications available for
- the student during the examination – questions unanswered, answered, partially answered, etc.
- the evaluator during correction of answer sheets – answers evaluated, partially evaluated, mark violations etc.
7. Automatic calculation of total marks - reduces possibility of human errors during mark calculation
8. Support for different type of questions – “comprehension”, “descriptive”, “match the following” and “objective”.
- Objective type questions are automatically evaluated by the system
How to start using DES?
Download DES
Source code, User manual & Installation manual is available for download from DES home page on source forge http://onlinedes.sourceforge.net/
DES Demo
URL: http://www.cdacmumbai.in/des_tool
Student Login details:
username: student
password: student
Faculty Login details:
username: faculty
password: faculty
Appear for an exam
1. Login as a student
2. Go to “Appear Exam” & Select “demo_exam”
Evaluate the exam paper manually
1. Login as Faculty
2. Go to “Examine Paper”, select “demo_exam” exam & select appropriate the evaluation strategy
Refer to “User manual” of DES for detailed instructions on how to execute these tasks & other tasks.
Figure1. Appear for an Exam
Figure 2. Evaluate an answer sheet
Publications
A Tool for Managing Descriptive Examinations
Archana Rane, Sandip Saha, M Sasikumar
International conference on Management Technology for Educational Practices (MTEP) 29-30 July 2009, Bangalore
People Involved
This work is done jointly by ETU and OSSD divisions. Following are the team members:
- M Sasikumar (Overall guidance) [sasi@cdacmumbai .in]
- Archana Rane [archana@cdacmumbai.in]
- Sandip Saha [sandip@cdacmumbai.in]
- Sunny Saurav (Past Member)
- Pradeep Kumar (Past Member)
